Turn-based Cyberpunk RPG with some great ideas but even greater frustration.
I love cyberpunk. I enjoy reading Gibson. A developer who releases a cyberpunk rpg, is guaranteed to have at least one sale - me.
Paradise Cracked takes place in a fictional city of the future. In the lowest levels, the working class tries to make ends meet, while not falling pray to the war raging on the streets. The police is fighting the crime syndicate, leading to frequent, violent confrontations with many collateral casualties. With law enforcement overwhelmed, the shopkeepers have banded together and hired their own security. And in the sewers, the remnants of the rebelion on Mars are banding together in a small mercernary force.
The player enters this setting as an unnamed hacker who just broke into the wrong file. Now government special agents are after him and he needs to find a way out of the mess.
Right from the start though we are confronted with the game's biggest flaw: a very slow turn based gameplay. It takes true patience to play this game.
A second problem one encounters in the first area are the factions. While at the same time one of the good features of the game, the open war between the criminals and the other factions means that it is quite possible that shopkeepers will get gunned down in the first ten minutes of the game. The frustration is similar to that one encounters playing Bethesda games, when one npc failed to load or another dropped through a hole in the geometry and dies - just that in Paradise Cracked the npcs don't die to bugs, but to a not too thought out game system.
After some starting frustration I got the hang of things and I was starting to seriously enjoy myself. I chose to be as good a person as possible, allying myself with a brothel madam to fight the syndicate. I entered the sewers and convinced the mercenaries to aid me. When I got to the upper sections of the city, I did not paint the town red...
Yes, the game gives players a number of choices how to get things done, who to ally with and what characters to add to the team. And the choices we make affect who will offer to join us down the line. Some of these npcs I really liked and do still quote, others were either blant or simply badly translated.
I wish I could talk about the fabulous ending but I cannot.
While I really tried, I never managed to finish the game.
The game's third problem: unreasonably difficult combat. At some point the difficulty of the game ramps up exponentially. You step out of an elevator, your whole party clustered up without cover and are surrounded by agents with miniguns. If you hadn't in the fights before, at this time you start save loading after every shot an enemy takes - the combat becomes pure luck of enemy missed and my team survived or enemy managed to hit me and my team died.
And as if that wasn't enough, the game's math is off. My sniper was lying on high ground, cradling the best sniper rifle in the game, having her eyes replaced with the best implants. Her target is standing out in the open. The game states that her chance of hitting the target is 100%
She missed 120 shots in a row.
I got so frustrated that I started counting.